Wednesday, August 23, 2017

Decorators are typically owned by the application code and can decorate a bean that's shipped by the container (build-in beans) or a library.

Interceptors are typically shipped by a library and can be applied (bound) to a bean that's owned by the application.

So how do you bind a library shipped interceptor to a library shipped/build-in bean? In CDI 1.2 and before this wasn't really possible, but in CDI 2.0 we can take advantage of the new InterceptionFactory to do just this. It's not entirely trivial yet, but it's doable. In this article we'll demonstrate how to apply the @RememberMe interceptor binding from the new Java EE 8 Security spec to a build-in bean of type HttpAuthenticationMechanism, which is from the Security spec as well.

First we configure our authentication mechanism by means of the following annotation:

@BasicAuthenticationMechanismDefinition(
realmName="foo"
)

This will cause the container to enable a build-in bean with interface type HttpAuthenticationMechanism, but having an unknown (vendor specific) implementation.

Note that perhaps somewhat counter intuitively the @Alternative annotation is put on the bean hosting the producer method, not on the producer method itself.

A small challenge here is to obtain the bean with type HttpAuthenticationMechanism that would have been chosen by the CDI runtime had our producer not been there. For a decorator this is easy as CDI makes that exact bean injectable via the @Decorated qualifier. Here we'll have to do this manually. One way is to get all the beans of type HttpAuthenticationMechanism from the bean manager (this will include both alternatives and non-alternatives), filter ourselves from that set and then let the bean manager resolve the set to the one that would be chosen for injection. We then create a reference for that chosen bean.

We now have an instance to the bean to which we like to apply the interceptor binding. Unfortunately, there's a somewhat peculiar and very nasty note in the CDI spec regarding the method that creates a proxy with the required interceptor attached:

If the provided instance is an internal container construct (such as client proxy), non-portable behavior results.

Since the HttpAuthenticationMechanism is a client proxy (it's application scoped by spec definition) we have no choice but to introduce some extra ceremony here and that's by providing a wrapper ourselves. The interceptor will be applied to the wrapper then, and the wrapper will delegate to the actual HttpAuthenticationMechanism instance:

Finally, we create the above mentioned new proxy with the configured interceptor binding applied to it using the interception factory's createInterceptedInstance method and return this from our producer method:

Note that there's a small caveat here; if the Interceptor needs access to the interceptor bindings (which is almost always the case when the binding has attributes), you can't just inspect the target type as one would usually do in CDI 1.2 and earlier code. The interceptor binding annotation is not physically present on the type. At the moment it's not entirely clear how to obtain these in a portable way. The interceptors in the Java EE Security RI (Soteria) uses an RI specific way for now.

Thursday, August 17, 2017

An extensionless URL is a URL without a final suffix like .xhtml, .html, .jsp, etc. Such a suffix is seen as technical "clutter" that's hard to remember for humans. Servers often need it though to route a request to the right controller.

JSF, a Java EE MVC framework, has supported extensionless URLs for some time via PrettyFaces (now merged to the general Rewrite framework) and OmniFaces. Both of these solutions used various workarounds to trick JSF into working with extensionless URLs.

Though JSF 2.3 does, unfortunately, still not support extensionless URLs fully out of the box via e.g. a single parameter, it can provide support for it by basically combining the new support for exact mapping and the API for obtaining a list of all view resources. Additionally combining this with the Servlet 3.1 feature for dynamically adding Servlet mappings and some JDK8 streaming and lambdas, makes it possible to enable extensionless support with just 2 statements (albeit somewhat long statements):

What the above code does is finding the existing FacesServlet, then getting all views for the entire application in a form that happens to be exactly suitable for extensionless URLs, and then adding each of them as mapping to the FacesServlet we previously found.

After adding the above shown WebListener to an application, its view can be requested via URLs like example.com/login, example.com/users/all etc.

Tuesday, August 15, 2017

A while ago we wrote about CDIs ability to dynamically add Bean<T> instances to the CDI runtime.

A Bean<T> is a kind of factory for beans, that makes types available for injection, lookup via the bean manager, or by referencing them in expression language. CDI producers (via the @Produces annotation) fulfil a somewhat similar role, but they essentially only make the "create instance" method dynamic; the rest (like scope, types, etc) is more or less static. A programmatically added Bean<T> essentially makes all those aspects dynamic.

As the previous article showed, dynamically adding such Bean<T> is a bit more work and it's quite verbose, as well as a little complex as the developer has to find out what to return as a default for various methods that are not directly of interest.

CDI 2.0 has addressed some of the above issues by providing a very convenient builder that not only makes creating a Bean<T> instance far less verbose, but also takes away most of the guesswork. The following shows an example:

Tuesday, June 13, 2017

JSF aka JavaServer Faces is a component based MVC framework that's part of Java EE and is one of the oldest Java MVC frameworks that's still supported and actively used (version 1.0 was released in 2004).

Over time, Java EE itself has grown considerably and as such the resources required to maintain and evolve Java EE have grown as well. Now Oracle has indicated at several occasions that it just doesn't have the resources required for this, and for most constituent specs of Java EE it can do at most small updates, but in other cases can't do any updates at all.

Since the community has largely taken over JSF already, should this perhaps be made more formal by actually letting the community (individual, foundation, or even representative small company) take the lead in developing the next version of JSF? In such scenario, the existing JSF versions (2.3 and before) and their respective TCKs would stay with Oracle, but JSF.next (i.e. JSF 2.4 or 3.0) would be fully specified, implemented and released by the community (OmniFaces in particular, with possibly the help of others).

Is a large and important spec such as JSF better off at a large and responsible, albeit resource constrained, organisation such as Oracle, or do you want OmniFaces to take over the spec lead role?
If you want, you can cast a vote in the poll below or leave a comment:

The following contains a terse list of changes, taken from section A.1 of the above linked Servlet 4.0 PFD document. All mentioned references to sections are to that document.

Requirement to support HTTP/2, see Section 1.2, “What is a Servlet Container?” on page 1-1 and “What is a Servlet?” on page 1 1. This includes HTTP/2 server push, see “HTTP/2 Server Push” on page 3 29.

Modify javadoc for ServletContext getAttribute() and getInitParameter(), specify that NullPointerException must be thrown if the argument “name” is null.

Modify javadoc for ServletContext.setAttribute() and setInitParameter() to specify that NullPointerException must be thrown if the “name” argument is null.

Update the javadoc of Registration, ServletContext, ServletRegistration for the behaviors of returned sets.

Clarify the behaviors of complete and dispatch in AsyncContext before the container-initiated dispatch that called startAsync has returned to the container. See Section , “AsyncContext” on page 2-13.

Clarify interpretation of fileName parameter for method Part.write(). See the javadoc for details.

Clarify encoding used for reading the request URL. See Section 12.1, “Use of URL Paths” on page 12-125 for details.

Specified support for HTTP trailer. See Section 5.3, “HTTP Trailer” for details. Add getTrailerFields(), isTrailerFieldsReady() in HttpServletRequest and setTrailerFields in HttpServletResponse. See the corresponding javadoc.

Tuesday, March 28, 2017

After a long and at times intense spec and development process the JSF 2.3 EG is proud to announce that today we've released JSF 2.3.

JSF (JavaServer Faces), is a component based MVC framework that's part of Java EE. JSF 2.3 in particular is part of Java EE 8.

Major new features in JSF 2.3 are a tighter integration with CDI, support for WebSockets, a really cool component search expression framework (donated by PrimeFaces), basic support for extensionless URLs, and class level bean validation.

The age old native managed beans of JSF 2.3 have finally been deprecated (although they are still available for now) in favour of CDI. It's expected that these will be fully removed (pruned) in a future release.

The JSF 2.3 EG would like to thank everyone who contributed to JSF in whatever way, by creating bug reports, testing builds, providing comments and insights on the mailinglist and contributing code. Without those community contributions JSF 2.3 would not have been possible! Thanks to all our fantastic community members!

JSF 2.3 (Mojarra 2.3) can be downloaded per direct from the project's download page.

Application servers Payara and GlassFish can be trivially updated by replacing the JSF 2.2 glassfish/modules/javax.faces.jar with the 2.3 version. It's usually a good idea to clear the OSGI cache after that (e.g. rm -rf [payara/gf gome]/ glassfish/domains/domain1/osgi-cache/felix/)